“... or applied in the wrong combinations, and have always been threatened, as the English Liberal John Morley succinctly observed, by the fact that ‘the Irish are more provoked by the extension of force than they are gratified by the extension of justice.’ Townshend concludes: ‘history may suggest that certain realities lie outside the scope of ...”

“... it helps the would-be novelist to know from the inside, as it were, what his people are up to. As John Francis more elegantly puts it in his Introduction, ‘you feel Pym knew more about her characters than is necessary for us to know, but that these reserves are expended only if essential for her art.’ As Johnson observed to Boswell, you cannot know a ...”

“... Sports administration is one of those jobs which have built into them the fact that they attract attention only when things go wrong. A school sports day takes quite a bit of organising; anything bigger, and the complications grow exponentially. Events such as Wimbledon or the World Cup are mechanisms of extraordinary complexity, in which most of the moving parts are human, and these events are, in their way, heroic feats of administration and bureaucracy and man-management – and all that effort just goes to set the stage for the real action ...”

“... A gloomy​ headline for early January: four million people in the UK have diabetes. There are 700 new diagnoses every day, the overwhelming majority (90 per cent) with type 2 diabetes, the variety associated with diet and inactivity. In the last decade there has been a 65 per cent rise in the total number of diabetics. By one reckoning, one in five British retirees is a sufferer ...”

“... Two cowboys in slouch hats and part of a (presumable) horse. ‘To me the window is still a symbolically loaded motif,’ drawled Cody. We are in Glen Baxter country, where the weekend shopping is done by electric launch through swamps full of piranha, and a very Thirties young man with brilliantined hair takes his beloved in his arms and gently squeezes her goatee ...”

“... Patrick Cosgrave presents us in this short book with a remarkable analysis of why Mr Butler was never chosen to be prime minister. When I think of Rab Butler, I recall Addison’s words: ‘’Tis not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.’ He undoubtedly had one of the best brains in post-war government – but he was never popular ...”

“... The London mayoral elections are on 1 May. The elections for the London Assembly take place at the same time. One salient fact about them is that abstention isn’t a responsible option. The election takes place under a bizarrely complicated system in which 14 seats, belonging to geographical constituencies, are awarded on a first past the post basis ...”

“... whereby we are enabled to test reasons’. This was a science which, Peirce was to argue, contra John Stuart Mill and others, must have nothing to do with psychology but be purely formal, with the task of classifying the products of thought, not of investigating the manner of thought’s production. As the study of validity in argument or inference, logic ...”

“... time himself) and Despair, both appeared here in 1936–7 on the list of the Hutchinson-owned John Long, where, writes the betrayed novelist, who has presumably been copytasting the books issuing from that too genteel imprint, Despair can only have stood out ‘like a rhinoceros in a world of humming birds’. These are promisingly sane, resolute letters ...”

“... many Western governments; close relations with the foreign media; and a unique relationship with John Paul II, whose third Papal visit to his native country in June 1987 was the occasion for a sustained defence of human rights, and a plea for Solidarity’s legalisation. By the time the Round Table process began earlier this year, Walesa was a powerful ...”

“... of his ability ever completely to conquer the French language (‘I’ll never speak perfect’); John Barnes is also co-operative; Gary Lineker is the nicest person in the world. But you already knew that. There are one or two moments in All played out when Davies’s blokily street-wise rhetoric starts to grate, but that’s hardly surprising in a book of ...”

“... from other disciplines. But a dissection of The Rite of Spring adapting from linguistics, say, John Lyon’s version of the theory of semantic structure, or a semiotic analysis of Grainger’s Handel in the Strand are liable to end up, too, as involved technical explanations communicating less real critical insight than the trenchant views of Taruskin and ...”

“... are in real sympathy, and can thus complement one another. In a celebrated inaugural lecture, John Carey suggested nonetheless that the process had gone too far, and that even giants like Empson and C.S. Lewis could be guilty in this way of serious distortions of a text: he instanced a bravura passage in The Allegory of Love on Spenser’s ‘Bower of ...”

“... all there were to go on were the few personal remarks about his ‘charm’ and ‘modesty’ that John Chadwick felt able to include in The Decipherment of Linear B (a book first published in 1958 and reprinted many times since). Chadwick was a Cambridge philologist, a specialist in the history of ancient Greek, who collaborated with Ventris on the closing ...”

“... in his career were household names: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Marco Pierre White and Elton John, Robert Maxwell and Richard Branson. There were also memorable victories against Jonathan Aitken on behalf of the Guardian and Neil Hamilton on behalf of Mohammad Al-Fayed. Aitken sued over various allegations, ranging from a claim that he was financially ...”